#ohni

to no one’s surprise i was seized by throat by the externally cold and grumpy yet deeply caring and protective character with intense magical/fighting ability. the first scene of ouni sitting in jail with his friends hit me hard - the idea of being so fixated on your ideals you are willing to go to jail again and again, he has to do it no matter what, regardless of what it means for his future, abandoning self-protectiveness and conformity ... but in this world they don’t have a future. the marked (magic) children die by the time they are 30, and knowledge of their coming death pervades everything in their lives in such a heart breaking way. the way they talk about the dead is so beautiful, as their souls becoming the substance of the world around them, its like having loved ones who have died is a gift, the sand and sun and rain knew you personally and care for you, but it hurts.

i’m thinking nonstop about chakuro and ouni ...

i read the preview of the first manga volume after finishing the season and in the manga instead of it seeming like his grandparent just really didn’t want him to write so much by calling it a “sickness”, it is described more clearly as a literal illness: hypergraphia, being unable to stop writing things down. it makes a lot of the anime scenes where chakuro doesn’t have paper and he’s chiselling writing into a wall hit a lot deeper. he just has to do it no matter what.

chakuro writes because of his desire to never forget anything, and pass it all on as knowledge to future generations, which is very strange in their world where repressing emotions is the norm, they are encouraged to forget painful memories (their magical abilities are connected to their emotions, and they believe excessive emotions will lead to an even earlier death), and the concept of a future is fairly abstract to the people with magic who will die young.

when they come in contact for the first time in the current generation’s lives with humans outside of their little mud ship and find that other people have rid themselves of emotions magically and don’t have such short lives, chakuro holds to his belief even more strongly that he wants to hold onto his memories of suffering, they are important, the memories of the loss he felt for people he loves are important because those people are important and he refuses to let them go. it’s something i was already thinking so much about - the narrative around wellness and positivity that encourages you to let things go and move on.

especially because of the short life cycle of the unmarked/magical people, so much knowledge and experience is constantly lost. all these children never get to grow up, death is everywhere. they try to forget it to live their short lives as best they can, but its more a way to preserve the status quo. it’s an uneven world: the marked, who don’t have magic and live for a long time, and only make up 10% of the islands population become the rulers of the island because they live long enough to join the committee of elders. the elders even lived through the creation of this society on the mud whale, but conceal how they came to be stranded on this mud ship in a sea of sand. what is so precious to chakuro, knowledge, the elders take from them. it feels like a metaphor for war, injustice, young people dying for the old rulers without knowing why.

chakuro and ouni are so different, but something is similar between them at their core. they have this obsession, something they want desperately that they can never let go of. i think (eventually) they could understand each other in a way no one else could. they have people close to them that love them so purely and simply, but i think as the story goes on, the people who love them don’t really understand their fixation. but they care for them, they care for them by helping them pursue what they desperately want, believing in it too, accepting things on chakuro or ouni’s terms to be able to be with them. sami asks chakuro to write something about her as she’s trying to talk to him while he’s distractedly chiselling writing into a wall when he has no paper, nibi runs headlong into rebellion for ouni, to be with him and have adventures with him, to try to find a way off the ship to find something beyond the world, but he says that really, he was always happy waking up on the mud whale under the sun, he just didn’t want ouni to leave without him. [spoilers after the break]